Justin's Political Corner

Democrat Tammy Baldwin defeated Republican Tommy Thompson in a race to become the next senator from Wisconsin.

Fox News and CBS News called the contest Tuesday night for Baldwin, who will become America’s the first openly gay senator — a development that progressives and gay rights advocates immediately praised as the results trickled in.

“Tonight, at the end of a long and hard-fought campaign, we have won a huge victory for Wisconsin’s middle class,” Baldwin said in her victory speech. “Well, the people’s voice was heard tonight, Wisconsin - and come January, your voice will be heard in the United States Senate.”

h/t: Sahil Kapur at TPM

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Tommy Thompson, four-term Wisconsin governor and now Senate nominee, warmed up the GOP audience for the main event, which was an exuberant, humorous, always biographical plea from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for Republicans to get their friends and neighbors to vote.

“You don’t want to wake up and have Tommy miss by that much,” Christie told a quiet luncheon of about 150 recently, imploring them to spend every day but Green Bay Packers’ game day calling names in the Wisconsin phone book.

“You don’t want to say to yourself, ‘I could have done something, I could have done a little more. I didn’t listen to Christie. … I didn’t make a difference and now we have her as United States senator.’ We don’t want that.”

“Her” is Rep. Tammy Baldwin, a seven-term liberal Democrat locked in an excruciatingly close race with the better-known Thompson for the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl. Baldwin started hard early while Thompson struggled in a four-way GOP primary that left him bruised and underfunded. Republicans say he has revived his campaign in the closing weeks and holds a slight edge.

Both the presidential election in this competitive state and the Senate contest will be a true test of the ability of the campaigns to energize voters weary after Republican Gov. Scott Walker prevailed in a June recall vote.

The election also stands as a tie-breaker on Wisconsin’s political identity. The state backed President Barack Obama by 14 percentage points in 2008 but two years later elected Walker and tea party-backed Ron Johnson over incumbent Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold.

The Thompson-Baldwin race will help determine which party controls the Senate. Democrats hold a 53-47 advantage, with Republicans needing a net of four seats to grab the majority. If Republican Mitt Romney wins the presidency, the GOP will need just three: The vice president casts tie-breaking votes in the Senate.

h/t: Yahoo! News

PPP’s new Virginia and Wisconsin Senate polls find the Democratic candidates in position to hold onto both of these open seats in next month’s election.

There’s been a big shift over the last three weeks in Virginia. After months of polling showing a tied race, Tim Kaine has now broken open a 51-44 advantage over George Allen. Just three weeks ago the candidates were separated by only a point at 47-46.

The big shift over the last three weeks has been with independent voters, who’ve gone from being effectively tied to supporting Kaine by a 53/40 margin. Kaine’s also cut Allen’s lead with white voters almost in half from 16 points at 55-39 to 9 points at 52-43. Any Democrat who can hold a Republican to a single digit advantage with white voters in Virginia is going to win handily. Kaine’s also leading with both women (53-41) and men (49-47).

Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, now running for the state’s open Senate seat, has an awful lot in common with Mitt Romney: He was for Obamacare before he was against it. 

Thompson’s campaign, of course, immediately rebutted: “Thompson has always opposed Obamacare […]” Always, anyway, since after about last June, when he wrote an editorial at Huffington Post urging governors to set up exchanges under Obamacare because it is a “tremendous opportunity to use marketplace choice and allow insurance companies to compete in their respective states.” TP also notes that he’s criticized the Medicare cuts Paul Ryan included in his budget, while praising how Obamacare reformed Medicare payments, and how he tried to convince Republicans not to go down the futile repeal path. Like that’d work.

All that’s history, though. Now Thompson is running for the Senate, and has to be as much of a right-wing whack-job as the state’s other senator, millionaire tea partier Ron Johnson, and of course the Wisconsin guy at the top of the ticket, Paul Ryan. The guy with enough health care policy chops to have served as secretary of Health and Human Services (even if it was under Bush) has tossed all that aside, and is now on the repeal bandwagon. Because he’s a Republican.

h/t: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos

Rep. Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, is set to speak Thursday night at the party’s national convention — and Brian Nemoir, the political director for her Republican opponent, former Gov. Tommy Thompson, has ridiculed Baldwin’s attendance at a colorful gay pride event.

If elected, Baldwin would be the first openly gay senator. In 1998, she became the first openly gay person elected to Congress as a non-incumbent.

WisPolitics reported that in response to Baldwin saying that her speech would highlight “heartland values,” Nemoir circulated an e-mail linking to a YouTube video, and declaring: “Clearly, there’s no one better positioned to talk ‘heartland values’ than Tammy.”

The video shows Baldwin at a gay pride event in 2010, in a park area outside a library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dancing as a garishly-dressed band performed the disco theme song to the Wonder Woman TV show, along with one dancing participant clad in a full superhero costume of the title character.

H/T: Eric Kleefeld at TPM

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Convention Committee Wednesday announced a lineup of convention speakers who will further solidify the party’s standing with female voters.The list, passed along by a source from the committee, includes the following names:

• Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

• Former Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Veterans, Affairs Tammy Duckworth.

• Sandra Fluke, Georgetown University student.

• Denise Juneau, state superintendent of public instruction, Montana.

• Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

• Caroline Kennedy.

• Lilly Ledbetter.

• Eva Longoria, Obama campaign co-chair.

• U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, together with the women of the U.S. Senate.

• Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

There are issues beyond gender that draw these women to the convention. Longoria has helped the president with Hispanic outreach. Baldwin and Duckworth are running for office. Ledbetter is the namesake of the first bill that the president signed into law. Kennedy ties the party back to its 20th century royalty. Keenan and Richards have been champions of abortion rights. Fluke has become a public advocate for insurance companies putting contraception coverage in their policies.

Collectively, the list of speakers — who add to the previously announced speaker and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren — represents a clear effort by the Obama campaign to drive home the point that one party is tolerant of women’s issues while the other is blind too them.

H/T: Sam Stein at HuffPo

Wisconsinites joke that Dane County, which includes Madison, the state capital, is an oasis of liberalism “surrounded by reality.” Baldwin cut her teeth in politics here, and she can bank on its support in the first statewide campaign of her 27-year career. “Reality” is where she runs into trouble. If elected, Baldwin would be the first openly gay senator in the institution’s history. Yet can a gay Madison liberal win over Wisconsinites in the polarized, cash-drenched Scott Walker era?

Voters outside Dane County don’t outright dislike Baldwin (though a few million dollars in super-PAC attack ads could change that). It’s just that few of them know who she is: Ask voters in northern Wisconsin about her, and you’ll get blank stares and shrugs. Thirty-two percent of voters responding to a recent Marquette University Law School poll had never heard of Baldwin. “You’d think that having been a member of Congress for a long time, she’d be known outside her district,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist who oversees Marquette’s polling. “But that’s not the case at all.”

Baldwin’s blue-collar appeal also serves to deflect attacks on her liberal voting record. At Larson Acres, Baldwin reminds me that she introduced the CHEATS Act with Rep. Reid Ribble, a Republican who represents Wisconsin’s eighth district—a rural region where Baldwin needs to make inroads. In March, she cosigned a bill sponsored by conservative firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to a build a new bridge over the St. Croix River linking Minnesota and Wisconsin. And back in her state legislature days, Baldwin co-sponsored campaign finance disclosure legislation with then-State Assemblyman—now Governor and Republican hero—Scott Walker. “Hard to imagine now, isn’t it?” she quips.

Baldwin has less to say about her own story. She first dipped a toe into politics as a Dane County supervisor in the mid-1980s. Her 1992 election as the first openly gay member of the Wisconsin State Assembly catapulted her into the national debate over gay rights, HIV/AIDS, and gays in the military. Six years later she replaced outgoing Republican Scott Klug in the House of Representatives, becoming the first openly gay woman to win a congressional election. A win this November would make history once again.

In the past, Baldwin saw herself as clearing the way for other gay and lesbian politicians. “Sometimes I think my most significant contribution is not the legislative initiatives I introduce, but the stereotypes I shatter,” she told theWashington Times in 1993. She has also stressed that her openness about being a lesbian plays to her advantage. “I would get statements from voters such as, ‘If you can be honest about this, I believe you’d be honest about everything with me,’” she told the Toronto Star in 1995. By now, Baldwin’s sexual orientation is old news in Wisconsin, says Susan Johnson, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. “We’re at a point as a state and a country that that’s just not as important of an issue,” Johnson says.

No matter: Baldwin has plenty more to worry about. Her Republican opponent, former governor Tommy Thompson, is as much a household name as Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and Thompson has consistently outpolled Baldwin.

h/t: Andy Kroll at Mother Jones

Democratic Rep. Tammy Baldwin is leading or tied with the various Republican candidates in the Wisconsin Senate race, according to the new Quinnipiac poll.

Baldwin and former Gov. Tommy Thompson are tied at 47 percent each. Baldwin leads businessman Eric Hovde, 47 percent to 43 percent. Baldwin leads former Rep. Mark Neumann, 48 percent to 45 percent. And Baldwin is much further ahead of state Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, 51 percent to 39 percent.

h/t: TPM LiveWire

FRIENDSHIP, Wis. — Rep. Tammy Baldwin stood in the Friendship Cafe, giving voters a populist pitch for why she should be elected to keep Wisconsin’s open Senate seat in Democratic hands, where it’s been for the last 55 years.

When she began to field questions, a 70-year-old retiree offered the first comment, and hit on one of the most difficult issues confronting Baldwin as she tries to break the Democrats’ recent losing streak in the battleground state.

For Baldwin, the first openly gay candidate elected to Congress, questions about her sexuality evoke her reputation as an unabashed liberal and a product of left-leaning Madison, and reinforce concerns about her viability in the more conservative parts of the state she’ll need to win the seat in November.

“I ran into all kinds of people who thought Obama was a Muslim,” said Davis, a Democratic activist from nearby Adams, adding that he’s worried Baldwin will struggle to get votes beyond Dane and Milwaukee counties, the more liberal parts of Wisconsin.

With Baldwin running unopposed in the Democratic primary, attention has been focused on the GOP field, where four Republicans are vying for their party’s nod to succeed retiring Sen. Herb Kohl, a Democrat. Leading the pack is former Gov. Tommy Thompson, who is trying to shake off accusations from his challengers that he’s not conservative enough while also positioning himself to win the general election in a state President Barack Obama won by 14 percentage points in 2008.

But she’s far less known in the rest of the state, where the party desperately needs to build support among swing voters. And Baldwin’s Democratic agenda will be tough to sell to a divided electorate that has repeatedly rejected many liberal ideals in the aftermath of the Great Recession. 

h/t: WaPo

Businessman Eric Hovde, who is seeking the Republican nomination for Senate from Wisconsin, said in an interview with The Hill that the presumptive Democratic nominee, Rep. Tammy Baldwin, is a Marxist.

“I fundamentally disagree with Tammy on almost everything. She has a more liberal voting record than almost anybody in Congress,” said Hovde. “Her philosophy has its roots in Marxism, communism, socialism, extreme liberalism — she calls it progressivism — versus mine, which is rooted in free-market conservatism.”

Hovde’s comments fit in with other recent comments from right-wing candidates, such as the declaration by Rep. Allen West (R-FL) that there were “78 or 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party” — with West naming the Congressional Progressive Caucus as the subversive culprits.

h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM

WASHINGTON — Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde (R) says he is sick and tired of reading sad stories about people struggling in the recession. Instead, he wants to see the media focus more on the debt and the larger problems afflicting the country.

Then, pointing to a reporter in the audience, Hovde said he would love to see the press stop covering sad stories about low-income individuals who can’t get benefits and start covering issues like the deficit more frequently.

“I see a reporter here,” he said. “I just pray that you start writing about these issues. I just pray. Stop always writing about, ‘Oh, the person couldn’t get, you know, their food stamps or this or that.’ You know, I saw something the other day — it’s like, another sob story, and I’m like, ‘But what about what’s happening to the country and the country as a whole?’ That’s going to devastate everybody.”

In fact, journalists already give short shrift to stories about individuals struggling in the recession.

In May 2011, National Journal looked at the nation’s five largest newspapers and counted how many times “unemployment” or “deficit” appeared in their headlines or first sentences. The analysis found that unemployment was covered significantly less than the deficit.

Hovde, a Wisconsin businessman, is one of four candidates running for the GOP nomination for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. The winner will face Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) in November.

h/t: Huffington Post

Madison - U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Madison announced Tuesday that she is entering the 2012 race to succeed retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl.

Baldwin is the first Democrat in the field and likely the front-runner for her party’s nomination.

In a video statement emailed to supporters and posted on the Internet, Baldwin set out the broad theme of her campaign: “to stand up for you (voters), no matter how tough the odds or how powerful the special interest it means fighting against.”

She linked herself to the political tradition of Kohl and former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold and declared, “It’s time politicians looked out for seniors, working families and the middle class - instead of protecting the profits of big oil and Wall Street.”

Baldwin’s early entry puts pressure on potential Democratic rivals U.S. Rep. Ron Kind of La Crosse and former U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen of Appleton to make up their minds about entering the race, even though a possible primary is about a year away.

With a strong base of support in voter-rich Dane County - and no candidates from the Milwaukee area - Baldwin has a viable path to claim the nomination.

In an interview with the Journal Sentinel, she promised to wage an aggressive grass-roots campaign, both online and in person, and vowed to travel across the state.

“Showing up matters,” Baldwin said, adding, “I’ve always been a people-to-people campaigner.”

To her supporters, Baldwin, 49, who was first elected to Congress in 1998, is a political maverick who voiced early opposition to the war in Iraq and has called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan.

“If you look at her career, people consistently underestimate her and she consistently surprises people,” said state Rep. Cory Mason (D-Racine). “She has a real message that appeals to people’s lives, how things affect them in the workplace, the doctor’s office. She represents the interests of ordinary Wisconsin citizens.”

Kevin T. Conroy, president and CEO of Exact Sciences Corp., hasn’t decided which Senate candidate to back. But he said Baldwin is a “great listener and she really cares about the businesses in this state.” Conroy’s opinion draws attention because his name was briefly floated for a run at the governor’s office in 2010.

To her opponents, particularly among Republicans, Baldwin is the definition of a tax-and-spend Madison liberal who backed “Obamacare.”

Former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann, who announced last week his bid for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, made it clear he regarded Baldwin as his Democratic opponent. He said his campaign would stress the differences between his conservative record and Baldwin’s record.

The National Journal, he said, ranked Baldwin in a tie as the most liberal member of Congress.

Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon), who is all but guaranteed to enter the U.S. Senate race, said, “I think Tammy is the epitome of what’s wrong in Washington right now.”

“I’ve never personally met Tammy and I hear she’s a wonderful woman, but there you have somebody in the state Assembly for a long time (Baldwin was first elected to the Assembly in 1992), she’s a professional politician, she’s been in D.C.,” he said. “But when you look at her record, it’s just a record of increased spending and higher taxes. And although I think she’s going to be very strong and tough to beat in a primary, I think in a general election that’s going to be a tough message to sell statewide.”

Other Republicans considering Senate runs include former Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, state Sen. Frank Lasee (R-De Pere) and former state Sen. Ted Kanavas.

Baldwin also appeared eager to take up the challenge to define herself to the electorate. One recent poll showed she had 54% name recognition among the state’s voters.

If she wins, Baldwin would be the first openly gay person to serve in the U.S. Senate.

“The fact is, I’ve been honest about my sexual orientation my entire adult life,” she said. “And integrity is important in public service. But what voters are looking for is somebody who understands them, is fighting for them and won’t give up. The election is not going to be about me, it’s about the voters.”

Baldwin’s liberal record - a solid credential among Democratic activists - would likely play a large role in a general election campaign. To win statewide, Baldwin would not only have to claim some independents, she would have to hold on to conservative Democrats in Milwaukee County.

Asked if she is a Madison liberal, Baldwin said: “What I am is a fighter. And when I fight for my constituents and when I fight for working people, that means standing up to some pretty powerful interests. And when you do that, it’s not unusual that they pick labels. But what I am is a fighter.”

H/T: Bill Glauber at Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel